What We Miss When We Judge a Decision by the Outcome
When people are judging the quality of leaders’ decisions, they tend to focus much more on outcomes than intentions. For example, they judge hiring decisions not on the basis of whether the decision was made thoughtfully or fairly but on whether the new employee performs well. They judge the quality of a product decision on whether the product was well received in the market, rather than the quality of the process that led to the decision in the first place.
As it turns out, this tendency affects virtually all human beings. When evaluating others’ actions, most people focus more on the outcome of decisions than on intentions, a phenomenon that psychologists call outcome bias. A decision — such as taking time to review an employee’s performance data and provide feedback carefully — is often judged to be lower in quality when it leads to a poor, rather than a good, outcome.
The outcome bias is costly to organizations. It causes employees and leaders to be blamed for negative outcomes even when they had good intentions and used a thoughtful decision-making process, considering all the information that should be taken into account.
Organizations and their leaders can benefit from understanding how to help individuals look beyond end results. Ovul Sezer and Max Bazerman of Harvard, Ting Zhang of Columbia, and I decided to investigate potential ways to eliminate (or at least reduce) the outcome bias. We focused on two possible solutions: evaluating multiple scenarios simultaneously rather than in sequence in order to best evaluate the quality of a person’s decision, and highlighting the role of intentions during the evaluation process.
First, in a series of studies, we asked various groups of participants to evaluate situations in which an individual who wanted to be fair obtained an unfavorable outcome, an individual with selfish intentions obtained a favorable outcome, or both individuals were evaluated jointly. We expected that when evaluators had a chance to compare the well-intentioned and selfish participants head to head, the evaluators would give more weight to the individuals’ intentions than to their outcomes, as compared to evaluators who only focused on one of the individuals.
We made this prediction based on prior research that showed that common biases can be reduced or eliminated when people evaluate courses of actions at the same time (simultaneously) rather than one after the other (separately). For instance, Iris Bohnet, Alexandra van Geen, and Max Bazerman found that when leaders assess employees’ likely future performance jointly (i.e., candidates are compared to one another) rather than separately (candidates are evaluated one at a time), they focus more on employees’ past performance and less on gender and implicit stereotypes. Thus, this research suggests, joint evaluation increases both efficiency and equality.
Contrary to this prediction, our participants weighed individuals’ outcomes more — and their intentions less — when evaluating them jointly rather than separately.
In one study, for instance, participants evaluated a physician who could choose between two equally effective drugs to treat a patient. Participants also learned that, although the drugs were equally effective in clinical tests, one was cheaper for the patient and the other would generate more revenue for the physician. Participants in the separate-evaluation condition evaluated one of the following two conditions:
Participants in the joint-evaluation condition evaluated both physicians.
When participants evaluated physicians jointly, they rated the selfish physician more positively than they did the well-intentioned physician. However, when participants made their evaluations separately, ratings for the well-intentioned physician did not differ from those of the selfish physician, suggesting that separate evaluators were less affected by the outcome bias than joint evaluators. That is, joint evaluators were more likely to neglect intentions and overweight outcomes as compared to separate evaluators. Thus, contrary to our expectations, joint evaluation exacerbated, rather than lessened, the effect of the outcome bias.
Such evaluations affect behavior. In follow-up studies, we found that they affect how people reward and punish others as well as whether they want to interact with these individuals in the future. For instance, participants rewarded with monetary bonuses the selfish partner they had been assigned to work with because the outcome of this person’s decision was good, but they did not award a bonus to the well-intentioned partner whose decision led to a poor outcome. And when participants had to decide whom to work with on a follow-up task, they preferred the selfish partner over the well-intentioned one.
Next, we explored whether highlighting intentions would help evaluators — particularly those who compare two or more people at a time — overcome the pernicious effects of the outcome bias. In one study, we found that requiring evaluators to make judgments about decision makers’ choices before the result of those outcomes was known reduced the outcome bias under joint-evaluation contexts but not in separate-evaluation contexts.
The lesson: Requiring individuals to make judgments about people’s decision-making process before the outcomes have been achieved is an effective strategy to reduce the outcome bias in contexts in which scenarios or decisions are evaluated simultaneously rather than one after the other. For instance, when deciding whom to hire or promote or what raise to give to employees, organizations usually evaluate multiple people at the same time. In these situations, asking those who are evaluating candidates to make decisions about them prior to looking at whether the decisions the candidate made led to good or bad outcomes for the organization would assure an unbiased process.
It is easy to celebrate or lament a particular decision or action based on how it turns out. But it is important to remember that the process that led to the outcome, including the decision maker’s initial intentions, deserve to be taken into account in evaluating the results.
What We Miss When We Judge a Decision by the Outcome
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